Judge Agrees to End Paramount Consent Decrees - Hollywood Reporter

After nearly three quarters of a century being the quiet influence on how Hollywood operated, the Paramount Consent Decrees are officially over.

The Paramount Consent Decrees have been in effect since the late 1940s when the government pursued a major antitrust action against film studios, which in those days, were vertically aligned with national theater chains.

A court-approved settlement then established rules governing the licensing relationship between certain studios such as Paramount and Warner Bros.

Other studios such as The Walt Disney Company weren't part of the original case, but have nevertheless been guided by those Paramount Consent Decrees.

In the government's estimation, total bans on practices like "block-booking" (bundling multiple films into one theater license) and "circuit dealing" (the practice of licensing films to all movie theaters under common ownership, as opposed to licensing each film on a theater-by-theater basis) had outlived their usefulness.

"Given this changing marketplace, the Court finds that it is unlikely that the remaining Defendants would collude to once again limit their film distribution to a select group of theaters in the absence of the Decrees and, finds, therefore, that termination is in the public interest," she writes in a 17-page opinion.

As for the possibility that terminating the ban on vertical integration would allow major movie studios to merge with large national theater circuits, the judge notes that such restrictions have never applied to certain studios like Disney and adds that "the Court finds that changes to antitrust administration, in particular, the HSR Act, provide federal antitrust agencies with notice and the opportunity to evaluate the competitive significance of any major transaction between a movie distributor and a theater circuit, which suggests a low likelihood of potential future violation.".

"In today’s landscape, although there may be some geographic areas with only a single one-screen theater, most markets have multiple movie theaters with multiple screens simultaneously showing multiple movies from multiple distributors," states the order